In kicking off the Macworld Expo
keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled
a new Macintosh web browser namedSafari. Jobssaid the browser was
"based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved
performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster",
JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons
to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform).
The KDE connection: "[f]or its Web page
rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source
project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open
source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive."
The good news for Konqueror: Apple, which said that it will be
"a good open source citizen [and] share[] its enhancements with
the Konqueror open source community", has today sent all
changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.
Congratulations to the KHTML developers for this recognition of
their outstanding efforts. Update @22:34: Dirk Mueller hasposted
an interesting mail from the Safari engineering manager as well
as his response. Hats off to collaboration!

Well gosh, thanks to your insightful yet subtle post I can now see the error of my ways. Your mispelling of my name, Microsoft's, and the subsequent reference to "lamers" have unquestionably put me in my place. It certainly gets right to the heart of my argument by referring to me as an "f***ing IDIOT". It is literally all I can do to suppress a "same to you, but more of it, nah, nah, nah" reply in kind, but I digress.

I have now grown up to where I realize just how right you are. If every key piece of software from Unix line were available on Windows, then of course the populace of computer users would flock to Linux by the millions. It's all so clear now. They'd all leave Windows so they can... ummm, errr, gimme just a second here. No wait, I'm sure it's something to do with... umm. I know, they could install a FREE Linux on top of the copy of Windows... that came pre-installed on their PC. No, that can't be it.

Well darn it, I guess I'm back to being a lamer, idiot, geek again. And here I was, so very close to being all growned up.

Raeding from your story, it has become quite clear to me that you have never taken the trouble to go beyond rather narrow boundaries as far as self education is concerned, which is of course good for Microsoft Windows sales as they focus on exactly this type of cattle, and yes, Linux lovers are usually of a superior intelligence and broad-mindedness, so the wheat is separated from the chaff, so what you call Geek is in fact a compliment, however, you are in no position to give a compliment because of your relative low scientific level compared to Geeks. Enjoy MicroCrap !

Actually, if you look beyond all the swearing and immature ranting, Mr. Pagliarulo has a very, very, very good point. I think that the whole linux community, already knowing a lot about computers, forget what it is like to not understand something about computers.
And Linux is very intimidating for a beginner. And Linus said it himself in an article that linux was not really suited for home users.
But if the goal is to provide microsoft with REAL competition, than the first priority would be to look at certain distros and make them more user freindly.
I understand the interface is user freindly, but there are advanced things many users can do in windows that seem totally impossible for non geeks in linux.

Then, once you had a beginner freindly linux distro going(knoppix would be the one i would choose), you do what he said and port linux programs to windows to give people exposure to linux, but being careful not to make people think that they should just keep using ported versions and never switch to linux.

My Idea would be to figure out how to get it set up with computer retailers like Fry's Electronics and Circuit City(Although you would start with little stores first) to have live cd's up by the candy and the cash register and ideally give them away free like AOL discs although since linux is free there is no war chest to pay for all this.

Now that all my productivity software is cross platform, it will take very little effort to just change the underlying Operating System from Windows to Linux. Believe me, the WGA tool microsoft is using really pisses me off as a legitimate owner & user of their genuine software. It took me 3 days and some support from their forums to figure out how to make it work. Too much trouble for a piece of software I paid for, but I digress.

Nothing would make me happier than to see more cross platform apps where the users on Windows could become reliant on those apps and then it will make the transition to linux painless.

when the day finally comes when the built in "windows downgrade" (accessible through the control panel) doesn't LET you run XP, i'm making the jump to something worthwhile. this would preferably be done sooner, but as stated before, its not as user friendly as it could be, the only exception i could find would be Ubuntu, an exilent idea. i already use OOo all of the time, but prefer the Gimp over photoshop, Firefox is a given, and love you guys for the link to win32 Konqueror.

Gnome is great and all, but if there was as simple an install for Knoppix or what have you, i know many people that would jump in an instant.

PS: i got this invite for a "customer satisfaction" survey in an email, try to be polite, but have fun!

I couldn't agree more. There is absolutely no way people will be convinced to switch to Linux without a taste of the best. Sure, vmware and stuff helps, but it just isn't as good as full throttle. I myself find life in Windows happy enough, but with a bit more linux without cygwin, just native compatibility, we will definitely have more switchers.

I'm a newbi on Linux and I can say that I would love to switch once for all to linux, but this is not easy.
I have been able to install a distro....but trust me sometimes it really feels like go only Windowzz, hey if not for windows probably I would not be able to work in my present position....anyway not going off topic....please ...please...Konqueror for Windows...(my interest for linux started with Firefox)...and trust me more open source software on windows will make people will look in a different way to linux..

Upon searching for a port of Konqueror for Win, my first impression at the start of this flame is, "Domenico is not someone I would like to either collaborate with nor take very seriously."

It doesn't take too many decades in the business to realize that there are many dimensions to software, and any given expert is lacking in one or more of them. Of course, we know some of Domenico's lacking expertise, notably professionalism, social networking, and emotional maturity; however, he is also not understanding the clear difference between commercial software and open-source software.

I hope some metaphorical light bulbs start popping.

Commercial software is created to be sold and updated and patched and supported, at cost. Quality here is sacrificial if your market is strong enough. That is business.

Open-source is geared to creating better products, of course, better in the minds of those creating them. It is a clear-hearted desire to make a strong, positive mark in the world.

In the end, one becomes better financed and marketed and the other continues seeking to improve yet remains hidden.

So while Mr. Pagliarulo enjoys getting his rant on, he effectively is accomplishing very little. If his experience is marketing, then he should perhaps consider applying his trade to aid those whose lives are dedicated to making better software products than propaganda techniques. Because as 'most of us' know, open-source is a story of collaboration that is epic. Nationality, religion, sex, philosophy are ignored in the quest for better software.

I hope in some small way Mr. Pagliarulo reviews this with an open mind and considers who he really is ( as perceived ) compared to what he perceives himself to be. I hope his next jaunt into cyber-wars displays an evolved perspective.

Who gives a hoot about which operating system is better. I personally use both, and it's all user preference. Please quit arguing and settle on "everyone is different". It bothers me to no end when people don't understand this. On a more related note, I got Konqueror working on my Windows via Cygwin. There's nothing wrong with trying to use Konqueror on a different operating system than Linux.

There is another reason why some of us on Windows want a Windows version of Konqueror. We want our web sites to be usable for Konqueror users. If we don't have a Windows version, then many web sites will be frustrating for people using Konqueror on the UNIX desktop. That will slow acceptance of the UNIX desktop.

There were times I had Linux installed just for testing some of my stuff in Konqueror-like browsers, still back in the time of NN4.x "bugward compatibility" coding that ruined 90% of W3C's ideas on web accessibility. I tried to make my friends think how great Linux was, but ended up buying Win-based applications, while there was nothing really challenging among KDE tools. Hipocrisy? No. Sole survival.

You Linux geeks wouldn't have to provide all the tools within the Win Konqueror version. I don't mind, after switching to Opera7 I'll never get back to IE or something, because finally I see the light at the end of the dark tunnel of xml-based content that was supposed to provide web content to all people and different browsers.

See, either you make a browser that's at least 99% W3C-specs compliant OR please, please gimme a chance to CARE for Linux users and check my pages before launching, BUT on Windows, while I'm never 100% sure on my xhtml/css layout. Do I really have to check them? Here in Poland i get 0.4% of Linux-user hits during the week...

btw I found this page looking for a chance to download Konqueror for Win. regards.

I agree with the above posts, especially now that the default Mac Browser uses the same rendering engine. It would save a heck of a lot of time and effort, I mean I could dual boot in to Linux or I could buy a Mac or VMware (yeah on my salary). But I'd rather just click on an Icon and test away.

I've done exactly the same as others - I've tested most of this particular site ( http://www.pompey-pics.com ) in opera, IE7 Firefox 2 and 3 and Safari, but cannot test on Konqueror at the moment.
I completely agree with the above comments, and also found this page searching for Konqueror on Windows!

Well, I was one of the computer users reluctant to "migrate" from Win32 to GNU/Linux, mostly because of specific applications used at the time. I must outline that most of the Win32 software I use to have on was not legit.

Four years ago, I upgraded my PC, and installed XP. My scanner was no longer recognised, and my printer and digital camera worked so-so, because of drivers. One year ago, I got a big nhard disk crash. I decided to give GNU/Linux a try, using the Red Hat 7 distro and the Gnome desktop. My scanner still was not recognised, but that was no worse than Win XP.

I had grown accustomed to the Open/Star Office, GIMP, Mozilla and Opera on Win32, so "migrating" to GNU/Linux wasn't that hard. I actually discovered that using binary RPMs was no harder that looking after a crack and applying it on an trial installation. Over time, I upgraded to Red Hat 8 and Red Hat 9. On the latter install, I decides to give a try to KDE, and was wery pleased by the quality and detail of the interface, which comes very close to a Win XP desktop in terms of ease of use.

According to me, GNU/Linux is very close to being ready for the desktop. I agree that it would be a mistake to try to make Linux more like Windows. Yet by porting native GNU/Linux applications to Apple or Windows, programmers actually broaden the user base and offer the convenience of having the same interface whatever the OS. Applications such as Blender, Sodipodi, Open Office, Opera, Gaim, GIMP or Mozilla could become universal, platform-free standard UI's.

There are some bugs in Konq 3.0 that prevent me from using it as default browser instead of mozilla.
Now I hope that most of them will get fixed by the safari changes and that Konqueror will really be the best browser for Linux/KDE systems.
When can we expect a Konqueror version that will include all these changes from safari? I'm impatiently waiting for it.

It still hasn't sunk in yet! The notion of using an Apple-branded browser seemed like a 'pipe dream' only a few days ago! However, here I am using Safari and looking forward to a brighter future-in-surfing courtesy of Apple and KDE. Kudos to everyone involved.

I don't know if all of you really grasp what "Safari" means for Konqueror.

Think of it: all future Macs will ship with a KHTML-based web browser *as the default browser*.

Apple has a total market share of somewhere around 5 % (approximately the same as Linux) in the Desktop market. So first of all, KHTML's market penetration will double.

Secondly, while Linux users can usually decide on installation time whether to use KDE or Gnome, Mac users have to stick to "Aqua" (not a loss, Aqua is great!), so while about 2/3 Linux users (optimistic guess) use KDE, 100% Apple users will end up with a KHTML-browser in their Dock.

Thirdly, a number of (Linux) KDE-users will install Mozilla or Opera as default browser. Well, it's just how these tech-geeks are: more toys with more options are more fun. At least you guys need some kind of email client and Mozilla's is just great.

Mac users don't need another email client. Apple's "Mail" is professional grade and beats most costly professional mail-clients. And while there are still a number of other great web browsers for MacOS X (my favourites being "Chimera", "iCab" and "Mozilla" - in this order), very few will see a reason to change the default web browser.

So my estimation is that less than one quarter of Linux users is using Konqueror, but in a while, approx. 80 % Mac Users will use Safari. Or in other words, KHTML's market share will quadruple.

But wait, there is more to it: over 2/3 of Web designers and creatives is using Macs - while their usage on Desktop Linux should be somewhere below 1 %.

This means that KHTML's penetration on Web designer's workstations will increate by some 5000 % (in words: over five thousand percent!). In the future, almost every serious web designer will have a KHTML-based browser on (or under) his/her desk.

Web pages will be adopted to look good with KHTML - not the other way around.

This is the good and the bad news: Konqueror is out of the niche and starts to play in the major league.

Apple's marketshare is currently 2.25% worldwide. That's obviously a far different number then their percentage of the total installed base of PCs but it's been down in the 1.8-3% range for many years so it's probably pretty close.

Not nearly half of all Macs out there are even running OS X yet so we're looking at a fraction of a fraction. It's still a pretty significant addition of KHTML end users though.

If Quark would get out of their vaporware mode I would imagine the OSX numbers to jump in a significant way. There's a lot of publishing folks holding at OS9 for purely this reason.

If another year goes by without an OSX version of QuarkExpress, I rather expect that Adobe will simply eat that market segment as the industry won't wait forever no matter how in love they are with Quark.

However it plays, the OSX conversion will happen this year. Plus the fact that all new Macs sold are OSX by default. That's a lot of boxes out there. Especially in the notebook realm.

Something almost everyone forgets in these market share estimates is the education market in which Apple has lead for generations though lately Dell is about tied with and Linux has barely begun to be a presence - and Apple is almost universal in k-6.

Now the k12 market is still running Mac OSes 7,8,9.... Mostly they are probably still running Netscape 4.08 - 4.8 though many are now in IE 5.1.x. But the migration to X has begun. Enterprise management for X has just begun with X Server 10.2 and will push ahead.

One of the biggest things pushing back is the State Budget crises - these force the buying cycle in k12 to slow (as that is where almost all k12 tech money comes from.) But there is a compensating influence. Up until recently all other departments tended to make requests of the tech dept to fulfill their own needs for hardware and software. Since the tech dept has generally run very low on money everyone is now putting up *their* money and asking the tech dept to buy the right thing. And X is what they are going to have to wrestle with!

>Secondly, while Linux users can usually decide on installation time whether to use KDE or Gnome, Mac users have to stick to "Aqua" (not a loss, Aqua is great!), so while about 2/3 Linux users (optimistic guess) use KDE, 100% Apple users will end up with a KHTML-browser in their Dock.

you mix up the desktop and the window manager (or the toolkit layout). what apple users have to stick to is the used toolkit, which is the aqua-design. you can theme this a little bit like you can theme kde, but it's still the same toolkit.

like running konqueror in a gnome-environment you can run a different desktop and replace the finder, which is what you mean. this is document by apple. then run safari (or any other application) on top of this different desktop like konqueror in gnome.

That shows Mac users to be about 4% of web users and Linux users about 1% of web users. I'm sure there are millions of Linux machines doing a bang-up job as servers (including Google's own machines) but there are more Macs used a personal machines. However, many of those Macs are old and not running OS X.

I'll bet more than 40% are on windoze (FrontPage, Dreamweaver (I know mac version exists, but im willing to bet more people use PC version) plus I garantee you that 99.99% of people who program ASP pages use windoze)

After the 40% on windoze, ill bet roughly 30+% use *nix on iX86. This is b/c it is easiest to test on (save files directly and test locally), it is stable, all the nerds, who are after all the ones making the web pages like *nix, and its open source, just like PHP/MySQL etc... So I'm sure they use it just cause.

The remaining % is prolly mac web designers. (30%-) Macs have no real pros for web disigners unless they are also doing the graphics, which i would say rarely happens unless they are freelancing on thier own.

However... I still do agree that the fact that Safari using KDE code is a good thing. It cant hurt. Down with MicroCrap

> The remaining % is prolly mac web designers. (30%-) Macs have no real pros for web disigners unless they are also

Uh, wtf????? I think you're really talking out of your ass here, because a great deal of the web designing masters, such as Mark Pilgrim, use Macs. This is why a great deal of web designers were stirred when Safari came out. It was something they started using on a daily basis.

> I'll bet more than 40% are on windoze (FrontPage, Dreamweaver (I know mac version exists, but im willing to bet more people use PC version)

I'll be around 55-60% use Windows in fact.

> After the 40% on windoze, ill bet roughly 30+% use *nix on iX86. This is b/c it is easiest to test on (save files directly and test locally), it is stable, all the nerds, who are after all the ones making the web pages like *nix, and its open source, just like PHP/MySQL etc... So I'm sure they use it just cause.

Working on web development and administration as my day job, I've noticed very few using some sort of UNIX. Of course, a lot of the time, they are using UNIX servers for hosting, but more often than not, the UNIX servers are colocated and thus must be remotely accessed (and not through graphical means like X11)

I'd have to say less than 5% of web developers use *NIX as their workstation. Perhaps 60% use it for their servers though.

I'm just impressed that Apple's front page for Safari explicitly acknowledges Konqueror, i.e. one does not have to search through a hierarchy of links before Konqueror is mentioned. (This is impressive! Where did you, if ever, learn about BSD code used in MS-WIN-NT/2000?) Could this be the start of sg. big?

Well, maybe ... I hope that cooperation between Apple and KDE developers continues, and that Apple will be kind enough to return the favour and, besides mentioning Konqueror in connection with Safari, include link to the Konqueror and/or KDE on the Safari home page.

Ummm, everyone's TCP/IP stack is based on BSD code. Some of the earliest development on the protocol was worked on under BSD. Mind you, I believe this predates the BSD's we know today by quite a while. Back when BSD really truly meant Berkley University was working on it.

> Where did you, if ever, learn about BSD code used
> in MS-WIN-NT/2000?

This goes right to the heart of the BSD vs GPL license. Apple couldn't release Safari without also releasing the source code, and thus the true source of where it came from. It was going to be pretty darn obvious whether they mentioned it or not. Might as well get OSS developers on their side.

Microsoft was under no obligation to mention BSD licensed code in their marketing, so they didn't. Nothing at all wrong with this, as they complied with all the terms of the license.

As to why Apple mentioned FreeBSD code within OSX right from the start? Couple of possible reasons for this, but none really to do with licensing. First off, Apple wanted to tap into some of the community support that comes with being a contributing member of the Free community. More importantly, it let the world know that the bug ridden infrastructure of OS9 had been removed and replaced with the impressive stability of FreeBSD. A definite marketing plus as they wanted to put the Mac platform under the Unix flag.

> that Apple will be kind enough to return the favour

I can't see where this is really needed. Apple has complied with the GPL by releasing their changes to the community. In so doing, both Apple and the *nix world at large benefit. Asking Apple to also provide free marketing is simply too much. Also, there's no real benefit to the Linux community directly at this point. Apple's web site is talking to Apple computer users making use of their hardware and OS. This isn't a segment that Linux is going to benefit from for quite a while yet. Even if it were, it'd be like RedHat linking to Suse's site. Just doesn't make sense.

First of all, don't get me wrong. I'm an os X user, and i don't think there's anything like it. I hopefully look at the GNUstep project, but then that's the same technology.

Anyway, Apple could have made this browser completely open source?? why didn't they. Of cource this browser means recognition for the open source community, but it is also an easy way for apple to come with a new OS X browser.
What I mean is, they tage the good stuff, make something nice with it, but don't share the entire code (I understood that the KWQ part is NOT opensource.)

soowe being an 'MacHead' I'm surprised that there are only positive reactions..

Are you sure on that. Can somebody verify whether or not the whole thing is open source or not? I've heard both that it is and isn't. Either way, this is a great thing for Konqueror and OSS in general (bugfixes and improvements to KHTML and kjs, and punting IE from the Mac desktop).

KWQ is release with the WebCore packages which I have already checked out and nosed around in, as previously stated it seems to be just a cut down version of QT and KParts just to get things to run, It is not and should not be considered a QT replacement and on another note please understand it is just used to get Safari to run.

I understand what KWQ is, and i agree that i's not such a big deal. It's good to hear that it's released with the Web-Core packages though.
The point I'm trying to make is,
Apple is NOT "a good open-source citizen", as they claim. They only contribute the changes they made to the open source part they used (correct me if i'm wrong). So that's absolutely nothing more than they are required to.
I would have liked a "download safari source code" link" next to the "download safari".

That is all they are required to do, that is all anyone who uses LGPL code is required to do. If the code was under GPL, it would be a different story and safari would never have seen the light of day. I don't see how what they did was in anyway not being a good OSS citizen. They contributed back code in the components they used from the KDE project and kept the code they wrote to interface with said code to themselves which is perfectly fine.